State of the indie publisher

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Emily Care:
Hey there,

Thinking about work that's to be done before the end of the Forge forums, I'd like to hear about the state of independent publishing and publishers as it stands now. We've come a very long distance from those early years here, and much has happened and much has changed. This is a good time to reflect and record where we are now, for future reference.

So for people who are currently publishing their own work or are contemplating doing so, let's hear about what you've done, what's worked best, and where you are putting your energy for future days? Here are some questions to answer, and more discussion is welcome.

What have you published? How?How have you distributed it?What has helped you reach the most people? Make the most sales?What's the biggest mistake you've made in design & publishing? Or disaster you've experienced?Who have been your communities of design? Who is right now? How do you work with them?What are your next steps?
I raise my glass to the Forge, and say thank you for making this conversation, and all of them here, possible. Thanks, Ron, Vincent, Clinton, all.

Best,
Emily

tymotzues:
Hopefull it will make a nice summary, so here is my part.

�What have you published? How?
So last week I published the first of many planned books, Ascendancy - Rogue Marshal, using my own FateStorm system.
It was published in electronic format only.

�How have you distributed it?
I chose to keep all my eggs in one basket for now and sell exclusively on RPGNow

�What has helped you reach the most people? Make the most sales?
It's still early days for me so I can't really comment, I am however in a constant state of activity sorting out new venues to post press releases and looking for willing reviewers - sadly I fear my little bit of RPG history is too intimidating for most of them to bother with.
In addition I've been trying to engage the gaming public with limited success (see 'crossing the bridge without feeding the trolls')
And promoting through my own website, facebook and just today, twitter.
I haven't seen a return on investment yet, but offering the Avatar record sheet as a free download has received a lot of attention from people who haven't (yet) bought the game. As a long time gamer myself I know you can tell a lot by the character sheet about a game, so we'll see what the results are - I'll be the first to admit that the Avatar Record sheet for FateStorm is slightly unusual compared to your average character sheet, but I hope it's not too intimidating.

�What's the biggest mistake you've made in design & publishing? Or disaster you've experienced?
The biggest mistake I think I've made so far, I'm embarrassed to say (given that I was a print production manager for years), is the consistency of my image and file preparation prior to PDF. This is primarily in regard to the RPGNow recommendations for PDFs placed on their site. I've made a lot of ammendments to the method of preparation I use now in order to maximise the quality and consistency of my products.
Also RPGNow's print on demand options are quite strict, and so if you want to provide both printed and electronic options then for efficiency you need to have the document formatting matching their requirements up front - because trying to re-layout a 288pg document from A4 to American letter is no fun.
The greatest disaster I've had so far is a typo on the promotional text doubling the amount of available magical weaves in the book. It took me a few days to find it and by then the text had been copied and posted around the blogosphere and forums. I immediately fixed the text and shot an apology email out to all my customers who bought the book. This was just an honest mistake but I still feel bad about it.

�Who have been your communities of design? Who is right now? How do you work with them?
The Forge has, by far, been my most accessed design community with regard to actual game design; second would be my gametesters. With regard to desktop publishing, illustration and graphic design I've managed to do all that myself based off my experience. It's still not perfect, but every book I publish will get a little better.

�What are your next steps?
THE WORLD!
But seriously... I've got so much to do, I've already got three supplements for Ascendancy in progress as well as another completely new campaign setting which is due out at the end of this year.
I'm going to be horking around the few conventions that there are near me and trying to attract as much attention as I can from online.

I don't know what I will do without the Forge, and hopefully we will all find an alternative through which to reconnect, as I think this is probably the truest and trusted place for indie rpg designers to find support and voice.

I'd also like to add to Emily's list of bullet points;
Best lesson learnt
Thanks
T

Paul Czege:
What have you published? How? How have you distributed it?
I've published roleplaying games and storytelling games. I've only ever charged money for the My Life with Master print book, the My Life with Master pdf, the Acts of Evil ashcan, the Bacchanal print book, and the Thy Vernal Chieftains pdf. People can buy print books and pdfs directly from me via PayPal buttons on my website, print books directly from me when I exhibit at trade shows, and also from a handful of retailers in the U.S.A., U.K., and Germany who consistently order and re-order them directly from me. Sometimes retailers and other indie RPG publishers have acquired books from me at a retailer discount to sell alongside their own games when they're exhibiting at trade shows I won't be at. I've only ever exhibited at three trade shows: Gen Con, STAPLE (in Austin, TX), and a non-recurring show, SMACC (in Michigan). I also make some games freely available. Nicotine Girls is a web page. Other games are pdfs. The Niche Engine is a forum post at The Forge. There is no central hub for any of it. Some of the pdf games are floating around in archives of design contest submissions. I should be more organized.

What has helped you reach the most people? Make the most sales?
Biggest single month sales for My Life with Master are associated with three events: exhibiting at the Forge booth at Gen Con in 2003, the year I published the game, winning the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming in 2004, and Patrick Dugan's review of My Life with Master on Play This Thing in 2008 being picked up by Boing Boing and then by StumbleUpon. I believe Steve Darlington's review of My Life with Master on RPG.net was also very significant in creating early awareness of the game.

What's the biggest mistake you've made in design & publishing? Or disaster you've experienced?
"Mistake" might be too strong a word, but I invested a lot of time in Acts of Evil, five years with it as my primary design project, before ultimately shelving it. I learned a lot about game design from that effort, but the learning has yet to pay dividends, and the result of having gone into a cave on a five year project is erosion in my public identity as an active, relevant contributor to the hobby. I was asked recently if I had retired. I think the next two games I'll publish will be stunning, partly as a result of things I learned working on Acts of Evil, but I can't say I don't wish I'd managed to keep better momentum as a public contributor to the hobby. Doing The Ashcan Front, a few contest games, and making deals for foreign language translations of prior games in those five years hasn't countered the erosion of my identity as well as releasing even a single small game for sale would have done.

Who have been your communities of design? Who is right now? How do you work with them?
What are your next steps?
I've been very very lucky. In the early years of the Forge I had regular phone conversations with Ron Edwards, and I assembled a local gaming group that included Matt Gwinn (who designed and published Kayfabe), Scott Knipe (who designed lots of games, including WYRD and the Charnel Gods supplement for Sorcerer), Danielle Lewon (who finished and published Kagematsu), and my longtime friend Tom. We played and playtested regularly for years, games like The Pool, Theatrix, an early version of Kagematsu, The Whispering Vault, SOAP, My Life with Master, Sorcerer, WYRD, EPICS, Wuthering Heights, and lots of others. That group dissolved when Tom moved to Chicago. And of course The Forge online was a fantastic community of design for years and years. Great feedback and playtesting of My Life with Master happened on The Forge. And we playtested and gave feedback on lots of games by other designers, forming friendships and relationships that last to this day. Mike Holmes helped me refine the dice mechanics for both Nicotine Girls and My Life with Master.

Since that first local gaming group dissolved I've assembled groups for playing and playtesting some games, sometimes including Matt, Scott, and Danielle, but also including other folks like Jamey Crook, Thor Hansen, Sean Stidd, Dan Anderson, Ed Heil, Matt Strickling, and my friends Eric and Melanie. But these groups have never had everyone's collective interest in experimental design the way the first group did, and they always dissolve after the one game. So right now my community of design is far far contracted from what it was. It consists largely of regular conversations with my wife Danielle, and with Jamey Crook, and occasional focused questions to folks like Michael S. Miller, Matt Strickling, Ed Heil, Guy Shalev, Thor Hansen, and Mike Holmes.

My next steps are taking every opportunity to form relationships with like-minded designers and gamers. I have good friendships now from last year's trip to InterNosCon with folks like Raffaele Manzo, Ezio Melega, Matteo Turini, and Daniele Losito, and also with Tazio Bettin. Danielle and I will be at Gen Con, and I'm hoping to run and play a lot of games at Games On Demand with folks I don't know. I'm trying to use Google+ to network as well. It's all about relationships. Increasingly I believe the thing you need most as a designer is answers to focused design questions and feedback from gamers who play widely and who understand you and your design goals. If you can get all of that you need, answers and feedback, and you put it to good use, getting people to playtest is easy. I'm starting to create small, focused circles on Google+ of folks who might be the target audience for my current projects, in anticipation of needing to talk with them.

Nathan P.:
Great idea, Em.

I wanna talk about what effect the Forge specifically had on me! Dunno if I'll get to all your points, tho. Also, warning, long post!

So I first encountered the Forge midway through designing my first for-real game, Timestream. I was a little stuck on something, and I think I literally googled "how to design an RPG," and my mind was ka-blown. This was 2004/2005 - so, I missed the first wave of design and games, but was pretty much right there for the second-ish.

I changed a lot of things about Timestream due to my new perspective (not all for the better), but looking back the real effect of the Forge was to convince me that I could actually, y'know, get it out there. Also, just being on the sidelines for the conversations about Gen Con and other conventions brought out my desire, and conviction, that I could do that too.

I published Timestream as a PDF near the end of 2005. Ron was literally the first person who bought it. Through the next couple of months I set it up to POD via lulu.com, and then printed 100 or so copies with a short-run digital printer that is no longer in business. I got it into distribution via Key20 (also gone now) and IPR. Went to my first Dreamation with it.

I don't think it's the best game I've designed, but I took it through this whole process, and that experience taught me a whole lot about the whole world of self-publishing.

The next big thang for me was Game Chef, which I had observed at the Forge, and loved. I first participated in in 2006, which is I think the first year the forum moved off to 1KM1KT. I wrote carry for that game chef. I consider carry my first mature game, and it's the first one where I really started thinking about the physical artifact as a component of the game experience, which is a theme I've been exploring since, in my own way.

carry was what got a lot of people's attention, which I appreciate. BWHQ was instrumental in how the game came out, actually - Thor and Dro playtested and had lots of powerful feedback, Thor edited the copy, and Luke did some of the image editing and sat down with me to look at the manuscript. He taught me more about layout in an hour than I'd been able to learn on my own in two years.

carry is also, clearly, a "Forge game". It uses a ton of techniques that had been developed to address play issues under the hottest consideration at the time, and is most strongly influenced by Dogs in the Vineyard, Primetime Adventures and My Life With Master. I think a lot of blanket criticisms of "Forge games" apply to it - it's a game where you shout BANG and then kick each other in the nuts for 4 hours.

I had trouble keeping carry in print for a while because of changes in my professional/real life. When Key20 folded, I did actually get my remaining stock from them, and my sales were never that high so I didn't lose very much money from outstanding payments owed. That was definitely a wakeup call about the risks of fulfillment houses, though. I'm still with IPR, but I had a personal connection (at the time) with Brennan, and trusted him, and since then the business has seemed stable enough. Sales through IPR have shifted almost entirely to retailer fulfillment, which is fine, but also reflective of it's place in the marketplace now. Anyhow...

Annalise is my post-Forge game. Going into exactly how this is is the subject of a different thread, but my intentions designing it were very, very reactionary. When you're immersed in something for so long, you start to see flaws more clearly. The development of the game was almost entirely private, also. This was 2007-2008, and the utility of the Forge as a design tool, for me, was on a downward trend. This was also when Kevin and I started the Design Matters booth, in the wake of getting kicked out of the Forge Booth at Gen Con. So, I was focused towards creating this unique booth experience, and presenting this color-rich, theme-rich game with underlying hard structure at it.

Printing Annalise has been my biggest challenge, publishing-wise. The first "edition" was a hand-bound set of books at Dreamation, and those took so much effort to make! And then, my printer for Gen Con flaked on me, and I tried to rush it through another printer, and the books came out terrible, and ugh. Everyone said "don't rush to publish for Gen Con", and I really didn't think I was, but then I did and it sucked. Thankfully, I think the environment now is much more receptive to not having Gen Con be the be-all end-all of game publishing.

Annalise is also where I've done the most experimentation with form and presentation, with multiple covers and different interior options and so on. And my take-away lesson from that is that it was ultimately anti-productive in the marketplace. It just confused people, no matter how much I liked it as a creator. Which is why the Final Edition is just that - one book, one PDF, containing all the material. I was able to get deeper into the printing process with it, combining multiple paper stocks and such, which I'm really happy with.

And now? Well, I took a couple years off of active game design to go to grad school. Since then, I've been looking at the stuff I've written over time and seeing what still has legs. I'm most actively working on my series of microgames, short cheap magazine-format games that I've been funding with Kickstarter campaigns. I feel very back-to-my-roots with these, actually, because they're weird ideas that I'm not spending any money on up-front. They enter the world in the black, and they don't sell much but they don't need to, because the goal is just for them to exist.

I've transitioned to a very private design approach, and I don't really talk about my work-in-progress with anyone until it's ready to actually play. I'm regressing! But part of it is a function of my current lifestyle, and part is that I'm not physically close to the same people that I used to be able to talk games with. Hopefully, I'll be in a position in the next couple of months to start making closer connections to local designers and start reaching out again.

I don't think I've actively used the Forge in any substantive way for, oh, 3 years or so. But so many of my friends are friends because I met them through this site, and so much of my work is directly attributable to the work done here, that I can say with absolute seriousness that my games would not exist without the Forge. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to all of you.

Paul Czege:
Erp. Davide Losito, not Daniele. There goes that friendship.

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